Andrew had a very good rea­son for not being at our very first meet­ing — he was near­ing the end of his 18 months work­ing abroad in Japan, but with a cou­ple of months still to go, we sat down with Clara alone to talk about every­thing rang­ing from the wed­ding day, to the epic pro­pos­al atop Mt. Fuji, to more ran­dom things like trekking through Algonquin.

She told us how most of her and Andrew’s rela­tion­ship had actu­al­ly been long dis­tance, since he found out about his place­ment after one of their first few dates. We hit on the hard­ships of long-distance rela­tion­ships and how they man­aged to find ways to stay close despite of the dis­tance between them… and then she men­tioned the big box of let­ters. Let­ters that Andrew sent dai­ly (except for Sun­days in which postal ser­vice does­n’t run in Japan), each one hand­writ­ten, unique­ly titled, and set to a spe­cif­ic theme (usu­al­ly things he liked about Clara), and there was over three hun­dred of them. When we final­ly saw it in per­son, and saw Clara flick­ing through each one and bat­tling to get just one out of the tightly-squeezed con­tain­er, we were def­i­nite­ly amazed by the intri­ca­cy, atten­tion to detail, and con­sis­ten­cy of it all.

It’s rare that we find the sto­ry we want to tell and even the for­mat of the final film just a few min­utes into our first con­ver­sa­tion with a cou­ple, but after talk­ing to Clara, we knew exact­ly what we want­ed their wed­ding video to be, how it would all look, and how the sto­ry would play out. The let­ters were just so per­fect because they speak direct­ly about the past, present and future of Clara and Andrew’s rela­tion­ship. They call atten­tion to the months that Andrew was away in Japan, to their jour­ney to final­ly be togeth­er on their wed­ding day, and the words in his final let­ter, deliv­ered on the wed­ding day itself, speak about the excite­ment of the life they will soon share together.

As film­mak­ers, we always look to find at least one sto­ry­line that makes each cou­ple unique; one that extends beyond the wed­ding day itself and real­ly says some­thing about the peo­ple we’re film­ing and cel­e­brat­ing with. This almost a per­fect exam­ple of that mantra and we are so hap­py with how it all came together :)